


May Not Be In Your Best Interest (Part IV)

by drea_rev



Series: May Not Be In Your Best Interests [4]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Emotional Hurt, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-28
Updated: 2016-12-28
Packaged: 2018-09-12 22:28:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9093205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drea_rev/pseuds/drea_rev
Summary: Continuation of my AU where Eric Bittle doesn't take thing as well as he does in canonFirst part:http://archiveofourown.org/works/7750279 2nd part: http://archiveofourown.org/works/7762639 3rd part http://archiveofourown.org/works/7884736Sorry it took so long!TW: fire, therapy, mental health discussion





	

Part IV

 

“Are you not trying hard because you need help, Eric?”

Bittle looked up nervously, but also tiredly. But he settled back into the comfort of the recliner and really though about it, checked his mind and whole body like you would “check” off a multiple-choice question for whatever was closest to the truth.

Sandy inclined her head again. “Is needing guidance or help wrong?”

“It is here.”

Sandy blinked. “I’m sorry, Eric, where?”

Bittle tapped his temple. “In here.”

 

It took a few sessions for Bittle to stop thinking he was wasting Sandy’s time. It took a few sessions for Bittle to stop trying to turn down Jack’s voice in his head, make his screams of “Get with the program OR QUIT” softer. Instead, he jacked—pun unintended—the sound up to eleven, listened for it, made notes for when it happened in a tiny Moleskine Lardo had given him last year.

Sometimes it happened while he was scripting a vlog. Often it happened while he was at practice. And most often it happened in a game. And it always happened when Jack looked at him with those practically transparent contact lens eyes.

Bittle started keeping a folder of photocopies Sandy had given him from workbooks on anxiety and depression. In fact, he started ending his study sessions at the library with making copies of exercises from mental health books that related to how he felt, and putting them in the same folder. It was a rainbow folder with a pug on it. At night he would look them over and read and reread them. Then he’d review his notes on how many times he’d heard self-critical thoughts creep in, and begin the difficult, difficult process of asking himself over and over whether they were warranted or not, helpful or not, or if they were just a strange by-product of a mind evolved to assume rather than deduct for survival purposes.

A strange by-product of being, well, human.

 

Ransom and Holster tried lighting a firework in their room. It wasn’t New Year’s. It wasn’t the Fourth of July. It was, as Lardo would dub it, Fuckwereyouthinkingmas.

“Everybody out!” Shitty screamed, running around wearing only aviator sunglasses, as the fire alarms screeched to high heaven. The smoke, yells, and general cacophony of coughing and Ransom or Holster arguing with each other about whose fault it was finally coincided with the siren of a fire truck.

You could see the Lax bros peeking out their blinds across the street at the worst fire scare the Haus had ever experienced.

Bittle had been coming back from class when he saw the smoke billowing out the attic and everybody on the lawn, including Shitty holding a fireman helmet over his privates. He broke into a run.

“Bitty!” Lardo cried, but he breezed past her. In his peripheral vision he saw Jack grabbing him around the waist and executed a spin-move deke that his father would have, ironically, been proud of, leapt up the steps, and booked it, coughing, up the nearly invisible stairs to his room.

“BITTY!” came Shitty’s yell. Bittle threw open the door to his room, not caring if he got in trouble with the fire fighters, and ransacked it for the rainbow folder. He realized he’d been panicking too much. He could always replace everything in it, buy a new folder—but it wasn’t about that.

“If it was a really bad fire,” Bittle muttered, eyes watering, “this would be a really dumb thing to do...”

A lightbulb went off in his head after the yells outside raised to a deafening crescendo—he’d left it between his bed and bed table, because it didn’t fit on the bed table. He thought he heard the spray of a fire extinguisher in the attic too.

“Aha!” he said, before breaking into a hacking cough, and before someone grabbed him around the waist and bodily forced him out his window.

 

Bittle was out on the roof before he knew what was happening. His papers spilled out of his folder and he scrambled to catch them all before the wind got to them, knowing he probably looked like the stupidest person alive to all the surrounding houses, his hausmates, and Jack.

“WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING?!” screamed a familiar voice, right above Bittle’s right ear, and his whole body froze.

“Yo, Jack, shut up, it’s all our fault, not his!” Holster shouted from below.

Bittle picked up the last paper to the untidy sheaf in his arms and turned around. It hadn’t been a firefighter who went after him, but it was Jack.

Jack, red-faced, the same scorching-hot anger in his eyes. Jack, screaming in the same voice.

“I don’t need this right now, okay?” Bittle said, swallowing.

Jack grabbed his shoulders. Bittle pulled backward, unbalanced, and almost gave himself another whole concussion by falling off. Luckily, he just fell into Ransom’s waiting arms. Lardo ran up to him and buried him in a hug.

Jack’s yelling continued when the man had dropped easily from the roof, when the firemen had come down from the attic, when Holster and Ransom were on the couch being reprimanded. Bittle could hear it reverbrating through the walls. Through his bones. He tried to focus on homework, texting, Youtube, anything, but he couldn’t.

Then came a knock on his door.

Bittle didn’t know what time it was. He’d been in a weird ears-ringing state since Jack had asked him why he’d gone into the Haus when it was on fire (in hardly as many words). He swallowed again, and made a mental note to just write off today in his journal as a constant, neverending loop of Jack-screaming.

And guess who was outside?

Bittle had opened the door a crack. Fear tumbled into his stomach at seeing Jack. He shook his head and said tightly, “I can’t talk to you right now.”

Something changed in Jack’s face, but Bittle looked away and shut the door so quickly he didn’t have the time to register what it was.

An hour later, there was another knock on his room’s door. Bittle opened it a crack again, but it was April and March.

“I don’t know how to say it, Eric, but...”

“This place really, really smells of smoke...”

 

 


End file.
